The latest issue of GQ has a 5,600-word piece on Anthony Weiner, which is way more than even I want to read about him.
But there’s a great pull quote everybody’s talking about. It needs some setup, so here’s just a taste of Marshall Sella’s sympathetic portrait of the dong-dangling Dem (emphasis mine):
I had a going theory about sexting and the whole twenty-first-century ant farm of technology that involves sex, and I wanted to float it by the Candidate. There’s a pretty bright line between the people who regard sexting as a repugnant, unnatural practice and those who regard it as absolutely no big deal. In the main, people under 40 can’t understand why it’s even frowned upon. Everybody does it all the time. It’s easy and fun and what the hell.
But politics, that fun-house reflection of how Americans are feeling, has a way of lagging far behind in such matters. In twenty years, one comedian remarked, it’ll be strange if we have a president who hasn’t sent cock shots around. That president will not be Anthony Weiner. He is going to be one of the final casualties in the moral war on sexting—a man who gained the entire world, then, through his own blindness, deceit, and prodigious sexting abilities, was brought low, rendered a punch line, and banished from the one career he was born to pursue.
Weiner mulled over my generational theory, then called it “overly simplistic,” which is what people always say when they want to gain the intellectual high ground on a topic. Still: “A lot of times, when people said to me, ‘You’re being pilloried,’ you could hear between the lines,” he told me. “You could hear, ‘I do this, too,’ or ‘I have this problem, too.’ But what difference does that make? I have to talk to voters in their own vocabulary about it. That’s hard.
“I will say this,” he said, saying this: “I have no desire to walk into a bar and pick up a woman. I love my wife.
“And maybe if the Internet didn’t exist?” he added. “Like, if I was running in 1955? I’d probably get elected mayor.”
Yeah, maybe! Probably!
Or maybe, if it was 1955, he’d get busted for exposing himself to women on the subway, on random street corners, etc.
Or maybe, if it was 1955, he would’ve taken the time to photograph his genitals, develop the film himself, and mail the pics to his pen(is)-pals. I’m sure that sort of thing must’ve gone on back then.
Or maybe, if it was 1955, he wouldn’t have exposed himself to strange women and resigned from Congress in disgrace at all, so he wouldn’t have “needed” to run for mayor in the first place.
Maybe, maybe, maybe. What might have been. The important thing is that it’s not his fault. He was a victim of circumstances! (Those circumstances being that he has genitals and a smartphone, just like millions of other people who don’t send dong-pics to weird groupies online.) And now he’s been “banished from the one career he was born to pursue.” It’s not fair!
Weiner also revealed something that we all kinda knew anyway:
“I duck it as best I can,” he added, “but [Huma’s] reputation has become the Woman Who Married an Idiot and Stuck with Him. More of it rolls off my back, because that’s the way I am constitutionally. She’s more sensitive. I’m just an empty, soulless vessel, so it doesn’t hurt me as much.”
And being an empty, soulless vessel makes him perfect for cable news. Come on, MSNBC, you know he’d be perfect: Press the Meat with Anthony Weiner. Let’s do this!
(Hat tip: NYDN)
P.S. Commenter Joe notes:
It wasn’t just the sexting, although that was bad enough. Weiner repeatedly lied about it to reporters and voters. He got caught once, asked forgiveness, and then proceeded to do it AGAIN. The guy has serious and obvious character flaws, in addition to just being a huge a hole.
Well, okay, if you want to get technical. And he did try to blame Breitbart. Details, details…